ata storage is a big business, inspiring investors to pump money into an array of startups. SimpliVity hopes to stand out from the pack, reaching a market value of more than $1 billion less than two years after shipping its hardware.

The Westborough, Mass., company on Tuesday is announcing a $175 million funding round, with $150 million coming from Waypoint Capital–an investment firm associated with Switzerland’s Bertarelli family that initially encountered SimpliVity as a customer. Read More »

EMC named Zane Rowe its new chief financial officer Wednesday, a move that may offer an indication of the direction the company plans to take as it nears a corporate crossroads.

Mr. Rowe, a former Apple executive and United Continental Holdings CFO, succeeds David Goulden, who will remain at the company as CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure.

Mr. Goulden has been serving in a dual role since July 2012 and will now focus on running EMC’s infrastructure business, said a company spokesman Dave Farmer. Mr. Rowe’s appointment is effective immediately and there will be a transition over the next few months. Read More »

Companies bringing flash memory technology to computer rooms have been consolidating rapidly. To get a real sense of the activity, though, it helps to read documents filed this week in connection with SanDisk’s $1.3 billion deal to buy Fusion-io.

One filing shows that Fusion-io talked to 11 potential acquirers between late October and May, as the Salt Lake City company pondered its future among rapid changes in the data storage market. Read More »

EMC, the big data storage hardware maker, agreed to buy a startup that is exploiting one of the hottest technologies in that industry. But that didn’t deter the company’s executives from suggesting the trend is overblown.

The new movement is based on storing data on flash memory chips, the technology that originated in mobile devices, instead of the spinning disks found in most EMC systems. Flash tends to be faster and use less energy than disks, though the latter can store data at a lower price per byte.

EMC recently fielded its own flash-based system, and announced Monday the purchase of a startup working on flash-based technologies. But its executives, at a sprawling company conference in Las Vegas Monday, said it does not support the idea that flash storage will become the dominant element of businesses’ technology for keeping and fetching digital data. Read More »

Security researchers have been dropping out of next month’s RSA conference after an article raised questions about the EMC division’s relationship with the National Security Agency. Now those researchers have someplace else to go. Read More »

IT infrastructure vendor Nutanix Inc. has raised $101 million at a valuation of about $1 billion to take on some of the tech industry’s biggest companies as it works to remake ponderous and expensive corporate data centers.

The push to make data centers more scalable, more efficient and cheaper as global Internet usage continues to grow is a long-term threat to EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other firms that sell hardware to run the back-end computing backbones of big companies. Still, the amount of money Nutanix has raised — more than $172 million in four years, plus $55 million in debt — shows it isn’t cheap for startups to compete with companies that have years of experience in selling computing gear to companies.

The startup’s executives acknowledge it will be tough to displace corporate-technology giants for the biggest customer contracts. Read More »

At least six speakers have withdrawn from the February 2014 RSA Conference,one of the top cybersecurity events of the year, in protest over allegations that EMC’s RSA security division accepted $10 million to essentially create a backdoor in one of its products. Read More »

Enterprise security company RSA is denying a report that entered into a “secret contract” with the National Security Agency to popularize a flawed encryption standard, making it easier for the government to spy on some computer users.

In a company blog post Sunday, RSA said it had long worked with NSA, and publicized the relationship. But RSA said “We categorically deny” acting on NSA’s behalf to incorporate a flawed formula into an important encryption product. Read More »

If this Reuters report is true, the National Security Agency paid RSA, the security unit of EMC, $10 million to make flawed encryption promoted by the government the default setting in one of its encryption programs, which could have allowed the intelligence agency to snoop on customer communications that those users thought they were paying RSA to protect.

The program, called Bsafe, is used to protect individual computers on a network through encypting data and communications.

The Wall Street Journal couldn’t confirm that allegation Friday evening; current and former RSA executives did not return repeated requests for comment. The NSA declined to comment.

In a statement given to Reuters, the company said: “RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products. Decisions about the features and functionality of RSA products are our own.”

The Reuters story also doesn’t say that RSA knew the encryption standard was flawed when it agreed to the deal. But the story could deal a further blow to American software and networking companies, some of which have faced allegations of creating backdoors for U.S. spies after a half-year of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance. Read More »